Samus Aran: Charge Beam Champion by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Samus-Aran-Charge-Beam-Champion-1127016370#image-1

Samus Aran: Charge Beam Champion ANIMATION

Thousandfold Shadow

They carved the interval into stone—one thousand yawning years—and sealed it with a tide of black glass that slicked over the mountain like a wound. When the glass weathered and split, a whisper leaked out: a syllable without language, a tide of hunger that remembered the geometry of stars and the first small deaths of planets.

Samus Aran arrived because the whisper wanted witnesses, and because witnesses were useful. She came in the quiet way of a thing that had learned to make itself small, to cut the edges of consequence down to a blade and hold it steady. The planet, designated HR-79c, was a ledger of old ruins and new rot: towers like ribcages underwater, plain stone carved with spirals that did not match any known lexicon, and a sky that folded itself back on the horizon until dusk seemed perpetual.

“Why here?” Dr. Elara Miro asked on the edge of the glassplain, her voice close to a prayer and to a market hagglery both. She carried a satchel of papers and a belief that the dead could be read like books.

Samus considered the archaeologist’s face—soft, earnest, persistently human—and said, “Because the creature is old enough to have taste.”

Elara laughed, a sound like brittle china. “And you think taste can be negotiated?”

“I’ve negotiated worse,” Samus said. Her armor gleamed with a dull, lived light. The visor reflected a split horizon: Elara and the black glass and, beyond, a cathedral of basalt with windows like watches.

Between them, the ruins breathed allegations. The ancient prophecy—tales traded in the black-market archives and buried in military logs—had been vague and precise in equal measure: every thousand years, the Hundred-Fathom Sleeps wakes and sifts the world for light. The prophecy said there would be a guardian and a gate and a single hunter who could thread both. The locals had given the guardian names like “The Measure” and “The One Who Counts,” and some children had made it into a boogeyman for bedtime.

Samus had seen boogeymen become gods before. Mothers turned monsters into theology to quiet their children; empires turned monsters into cautionary infrastructure. She’d been the instrument that unfroze fossils and folded crises into neat corpses. But this felt different—it pulsed with a loneliness that bothered the edges of her suit.

They walked into the basilica of basalt where the glass had cleaved. The interior was an ellipsis of shadow. Statues of an unremembered order paced the nave, their faces melted to geometry. Moonlight, or whatever passed for it here, fell through the broken windows and broke itself into a lattice that the floor-circuits drank like wine.

“There's a smell,” Elara said. “Not rot. Not ozone. A memory.”

Samus inhaled the ghost of it and found something else: music under the stone, keys played on a table of bone. The ship’s telemetry hummed in her ear, an undercurrent of rationality that kept the dark from being total.

“You've been reading the same sources as I have,” Elara said, fingers tracing a glyph. “They wrote: ‘When the tide calls, the thousandfold returns—but only where the counting fails.’ That sounds like metaphor.”

“You're looking for metaphors,” Samus corrected. “I'm looking for the thing making the metaphors necessary.”

They found the gate in a chamber that did not appear on the maps. It was a ring of teeth incised with numbers that did not add up: primes fused into spiral calendars, loops that seemed to tally nothing and everything. At the ring’s center, under a halo of slow dust, a slab lay like a lid removed with dreadful politeness.

Elara knelt. “This is a trap of math,” she said. “Anxious integers held like prayers.”

“Then we should stop praying,” Samus replied. She placed a gloved hand upon the slab and felt the thickness of a slow heart. It recoiled, a murmur like a thing disturbed in sleep. The visor flared.

“You shouldn't touch it,” Elara whispered, as if the slab could hear.

“I'm not touching it,” Samus said. Her suit's sensors fed her the world in numbers: mass, density, micro-vibrations that could be translated into a kind of speech. The slab answered in a language her training could not swallow whole. But the pattern was clear: temporal regulation—an interface designed not to open a gate so much as to count the moments until something righted itself.

Something laughed then—not a laugh with lungs but the sound of a tal
...(more at https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai).
For more supergirl, chun li, batgirl, tifa, lara croft, wonder woman, rogue and much more, please visit my page at www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai - Thanks for your support :)